


Watched

by inlovewithnight



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:05:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the Twice Told Fandom challenge.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Watched

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Twice Told Fandom challenge.

Constant surveillance plays tricks with your head.

When he was on the run, Ronon had known he was being tracked all the time, but that isn't the same as being _watched_. Feeling eyes on the back of your neck. Knowing every step you take, every turn of your head, every motion of your hands is being broken down to be used against you by whatever bastards are holding you prisoner.

Being in prison plays tricks with your head, too. It's one of Ronon's least favorite things in the universe, right up there with the Wraith. And being watched all the time.

It doesn't seem to bother Sheppard, but then, Ronon's never really been able to pin down what _does_ bother Sheppard. He thinks he could take everything he knows about the man and carry it in his hands. That's never really bothered him, though, because the thing that carries the most weight is that he trusts Sheppard--as a leader and as a man--even when it doesn't make all that much sense.

Sheppard sits with his back to the wall and his eyes closed, face tilted toward the sun. Ronon doesn't know if that's to fool the watching eyes or if Sheppard just doesn't feel them. He can't ask. If someone is watching, then they must be listening, too. That's just good sense, just reasonable.

Even with his time on Atlantis, Ronon thinks he is a reasonable man.

The guards bring an evening meal. Sheppard makes lazy conversation while they eat, wishing for meatloaf or popcorn or peanut butter sandwiches. Ronon doesn't bother to respond. If it's a game Sheppard is playing to annoy the watchers, Ronon isn't going to waste his energy; if it's just Sheppard seeking one of his inexplicable forms of entertainment, like football or golf, Ronon's in no mood to humor him. They're prisoners. The only priority is escape.

When the sun drops far enough beneath the walls, their cell gets too dark to see. No artificial lights appear. They fold their jackets into pillows and stretch out on the bare ground, looking up at the stars.

Ronon can still close his eyes, run through a Satedan military chant one and a half times, and be asleep in body and mind but ready to be on his feet and fighting in a heartbeat. He doesn't want to, though. Not with this feeling of eyes moving along his skin slow and relentless as insects, sweeping him for a point that they can penetrate and drain.

"Sheppard," he says, his voice rough from its silence through the day. "You all right?"

There's a silence before the answer, and when it comes it's more relaxed than Ronon expects to hear, almost more than he can stand. It feels wrong, sets his teeth on edge, and if Sheppard's going to keep this attitude up for very long, they're going to have a problem.

"Yeah," Sheppard says finally, his voice cool, no different from any other time. "Get some sleep."

Ronon has to go through the chant twice, for the first time since he was twelve. Ancestors before him, he really, truly, in all ways, hates prison.

**

His dreams don't make any sense.

It's not that they're full of strange patterns, symbols, unsettling and unwanted information from the lower parts of his mind; he's never been particularly fond of mystics or shamans, but he's not an idiot and he can recognize those things as normal parts of dreams. These dreams are full of places and people that he doesn't know, yet in his sleep he feels perfectly at home.

None of it stays clear when he wakes up. He's left with sore muscles and dull aches from the cold ground, a foggy sense of unease in his head, and a strong urge to punch Sheppard in the mouth when the man starts going on about French toast and omelettes as soon as the guards bring breakfast.

**

There they learn there's no midday meal here, and act accordingly, keeping still and quiet through the long hours of the afternoon. The air is hot and still, empty, carrying no signs of life from outside their cell. Ronon takes a rock and scratches a shallow line in the dirt by one wall; after dinner he'll scrape out a hole where they can save something from each meal and ration themselves through the day.

Sheppard sits by the wall again, eyes closed and head back, only occasionally stirring to talk about something meaningless. Ronon can't decide if this is completely typical behavior or dangerously strange. Finally, he goes over to him, pins him down, forces his eyelids open, and checks the size of his pupils against each other. A head injury would explain a lot, and it would be just like Sheppard to have one and not say anything.

John struggles under his hands at first, which is reassuring. That's what Ronon was hoping for. But then John stops, sighs, goes still again in surrender. That's wrong enough to make Ronon's skin crawl even more than the feeling of being watched.

There's no sign of a concussion, though. John's just passive. Calm, almost careless. Ronon can't imagine how anyone can be so calm when they're being watched like this, when prying eyes are all but hovering in the air.

Having to worry about Sheppard on top of everything else is pretty damned inconvenient. He's noticed that the people from Earth seem to specialize in inconvenient. It's something they can stand to work on. Especially Sheppard.

**

That night, the dreams get a little sharper, clearer. He speaks to a woman in one of them for a long time. Her face is blurred, evading his eyes, but she has gray eyes and long hair in a rich brown-red color. Somehow knows that color isn't really hers--there's an echo to the dream, like a memory, of her wearing an old, stained shirt and fastening her hair up behind her head with a clip, the thick smell of chemicals and fake flowers making him sneeze.

When he wakes up, he can't remember her face, but her voice echoes in the back of his mind all day, asking him to go to the store and get tonic water, and toilet paper, and pickles.

**

On the third day, the guards take Sheppard away for interrogation. Ronon's instinct is not to allow it, to fight until the guards either back off or drag them out broken.

But Sheppard tells him to stand down. "Maybe I can find out what's going on," he says, standing between Ronon and the guards. His back is to the enemy, another thing that's _wrong_ here. Every fiber of Ronon's body screams at him to refuse.

"Trust me," John says. Ronon's so used to doing that, since going to Atlantis, that he ignores his own senses and steps aside. Sheppard walks out of the cell ahead of the guards with a faint smile on his face.

Ronon sits at the center of the cell and studies each row of brick at the top of each wall, one brick at a time, twice each, channeling as much of his frustration as he can into a meticulous search. He feels the eyes on him, and they come from above; there is no roof, and so the cameras must be in the walls.

He doesn't find them. These people are clever, then. He eats his half of the hoarded food and thinks _tonic water, toilet paper, pickles_ until he's tempted to gouge his own eye out just to make it stop running through his head.

Sheppard comes back just as calm and peaceful and passive as when they took him, and tells him not to worry about a thing. Ronon stares at him for a long moment, trying to decide if maybe a head injury could be the _solution_ to the problem, if it isn't the cause.

In the end, though, he just turns away and writes Sheppard off from ally to liability. That leaves Ronon's assets as four knives, one rock, his own body, and the questionable hope that Atlantis will send someone after them sometime fairly soon.

It's not the worst situation he's seen, but it's far from the best. He stretches out on the ground in the dark and glares up at the sky, thinking sourly that it would really just top things off if the Wraith showed up.

Then he remembers Lantean luck and wishes he hadn't even let that thought cross his mind. No reason to tempt fate any more than Sheppard's very existence seems to.

**

Three more days go by. Sheppard stops even telling stupid stories. He just sits and sleeps and sometimes hums to himself. Something's seriously wrong with him, but Ronon doesn't have the energy or resources to spare for it; as long as Sheppard keeps eating and doesn't start bashing his head against the walls, he counts as _all right_.

Of course, when Sheppard comes back from a second interrogation smiling through split lips and a bloody mouth, Ronon has to rethink that. Can't let him be interrogated anymore, then, if he can't look after himself. "We're going to have to do some work when we get back to Atlantis," he mutters, running his hands along Sheppard's arms and legs, checking for other, hidden injuries. "Never going to let you live this down. Can't even go to prison without getting brainwashed or...something. Whatever the hell is wrong with you."

John leans his head against Ronon's shoulder, a heavy and helpless weight. They sit like that until the sun disappears behind the wall, then stretch out on the ground again. John lies with his head against the bare dirt, staring up at the stars, and Ronon has to fold the jacket into a pillow again for him, lift his head, and put it in place. He stays awake until John falls asleep, listening to his breathing and watching the motion of his eyes behind their lids. Not right. Not one thing here is right.

Ronon's dreams still aren't his. He pages through books in a language he can't read, sings songs he's never heard, jokes and laughs with the woman he doesn't know. She smiles at him, and he takes the clip out of her hair as she slips the shirt off her shoulders. The dark strands stain his fingers, and he catches himself checking them even after he wakes up.

**

On the fourth day, Sheppard doesn't wake up. He just lies unconscious and still, even when Ronon's voice breaks into a shout.

The guards come for Sheppard and Ronon knocks two of them unconscious and dislocate a third's kneecap before they give up and back away. The watching eyes are now staring at him with disapproval, and even if that's all in his head, Ronon has to laugh.

"If you really thought that was going to work, I guess you haven't been watching all that closely after all," he says, dragging Sheppard over to the back wall. "Not going to happen.

**

He sits with his back to the wall, Sheppard next to him with his head pillowed on both of their jackets. He studies the bricks at the top of the cell again, as slowly and methodically as he can stand. It's a final look, a courtesy check.

He knows it now: there are no cameras. He's intimately aware of every crack, every pit in the surface, every tiny spatter of bird shit. He could rebuild these walls from memory.

He trusts that, his own memory, his own mind, even if reason says he can't trust anything else here. Nothing at all, if he's right.

He _is_ right. He knows it, however unreasonable it seems. He's never been all that married to reason and logic anyway.

"So you're a telepath," he says, glaring up at the sky. "I figured it out, do I get a prize?"

There's no answer. Ronon can't help his disappointment, the emotion running through his too-long-tensed muscles with a shudder that's chased by a flash of rage. He smacks his fist against the ground hard enough to tear the skin on his knuckles, the slow slide of blood a comfort in its familiarity, its inevitability. "Come on," he snarls up at nothing, at the something that he _knows_ is there behind it. "I figured it out. Gotta be worth something."

Still nothing. He looks down at Sheppard's face and carefully pushes the man's hair back off his forehead. "It's a telepath," he mutters, to his friend and to himself. "I hope I didn't just piss it off."

**

That night it rains. They both get soaked to the skin, stuck under open sky and invisible eyes. He can't sleep through it but Sheppard does, twisting and muttering to himself in thick, unclear tones while his lips turn blue. Finally Ronon hauls Sheppard into his lap in a half-assed attempt to share body heat.

"This is bullshit," he shouts above the rain. "You hear me?"

It's freezing damned cold in the rain and the thickening mud, under Sheppard's heavy, limp weight. Ronon ducks his head and thinks of all of the planets where he fought the Wraith. At least half of them were worse than this. If he didn't die _there_, he's not going to die _here_. He's not letting this place kill Sheppard, either. It doesn't get to win even that much. It doesn't get to take _anything_.

"You're a cheater," he growls up at the storm, "and a coward. And if the best you can come up with is some dreams and some rain then you're not good enough to ever--ever--get my surrender. Go to hell."

The storm rages on for another hour, unimpressed. By the time it stops, Ronon's frozen in his skin and halfway to either delirious or asleep.

**

The woman kisses him on the cheek and takes the bag from his arms. He watches her unpack it--tonic water, toilet paper, pickles, and a bouquet of yellow daisies.

She smiles, bright and lovely. "Baby," she says, and kisses him again. "You just want me to let you go golfing next Sunday, don't you? I'm on to you."

_You have go to be kidding me_, Ronon thinks, and opens his eyes to stare at a very pale and anxious Dr. McKay.

**

"So it was a telepath." Ronon takes another spoonful of whatever nutrient-rich broth crap they brought in the jumper. It'll work until they get back to the city for real food.

"Yes." McKay opens his mouth to say more, but stops when Ronon laughs.

"I knew it."

"Yes, well, good for you. Even a stopped clock's right twice a day." McKay rolls his eyes and looks at Sheppard, who's blinking unhappily from under two thermal blankets. "And you were even lucky enough not to get hypothermia like Sheppard. We should give you a prize."

"I wasn't in a coma from having my brain eaten by a telepath."

"It didn't eat my brain." Sheppard looks highly offended, and Ronon laughs again. Being alive enough to laugh is always a good sign.

"So how did you get it to let us go?" Ronon asks, gulping down more of the broth. It doesn't have much going for it, but it's _warm_ and that's good enough right now.

"Very delicate negotiations," McKay says, frowning down at his computer.

Teyla smiles. "It strongly disliked Dr. McKay's presence."

Sheppard laughs then, a small and wheezing sound. That's an even better sign, and Ronon reaches over to tug the blankets higher around him.

"Why did it get so focused on Sheppard?"

"Well," McKay says, frowning even more intently at the computer, "it's hard to say. Probably a complex interaction of factors, brain chemistry...the amazing vacuousness of the Colonel's mind might have had a certain challenge to it..."

"It was in love with me," Sheppard says. Ronon thinks he sounds smug.

McKay rolls his eyes. "A wild crush at _best_. Your ego is an embarrassment."

Ronon finishes his broth and sets the bowl aside. "Any idea why it was giving me Sheppard's dreams?"

Sheppard sits up at that, or tries to before Teyla pushes him back down. McKay smiles triumphantly. "It was a very young and _confused_ telepath," he says, giving Sheppard a pointed look. "Barely a teenager. Didn't have a clue what it was doing."

Ronon nods as Sheppard burrows down further under his blankets, glaring at them all. "Figures."

Teyla touches Ronon gently on the shoulder and then takes McKay's arm, guiding him back to the front of the jumper. Ronon sits back and closes his eyes for a minute, savoring the satisfaction of a full stomach, a safe place, and freedom from watching eyes.

Except someone _is_ watching him. He sighs and looks over at Sheppard. "What?"

"You were having my dreams?"

Ronon shrugs. "Yeah." It's fun watching Sheppard twitch and squirm and decide if he wants to keep going or just give up now. Of all the activities he's discovered since coming to Atlantis, Ronon thinks this is his third-favorite.

"Were they...they weren't _weird_ dreams, were they?"

"There was a girl."

"Oh." Sheppard nods and disappears so far under the blankets, only his eyes show. "Well, then."

Ronon shakes his head. "Don't worry about it."

"Thanks for, you know, helping me out back there."

"You don't have to thank me." Sometimes he wonders just how long it's going to take for Sheppard to catch on to how these things work.

"Still, I owe you one."

Apparently quite a bit longer. "You owe me twenty," he points out, and Sheppard frowns. Ronon turns on his side and smiles. He closes his eyes and starts his mental chant, safe enough to sleep all the way back to Atlantis.


End file.
